Indian National Congress(Congress(I))

The Indian National Congress (mostly known as the Congress(I)) is one of the major political parties in India. It is the largest and one of the oldest political parties in the world. The party’s modern liberal platform is largely considered to be on the centre-left of the Indian political spectrum in contrast to the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Organization was founded in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, Dadabhai Naoroji, Dinshaw Wacha, Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerjee, Monomohun Ghose, Mahadev Govind Ranade and William Wedderburn. Hume was also a prominent member of the Theosophical Society. In the following decades, the Indian National Congress became a pivotal participant in the Indian Independence Movement, with over 15 million members and over 70 million participants in its struggle against British colonial rule in India. After independence in 1947, it became the nation’s dominant political party; in the 15 general elections since independence, the Congress has won an outright majority on six occasions, and has led the ruling coalition a further four times, heading the central government for a total of 49 years. It has been led by the Nehru-Gandhi family for the most part, with major challenges for party leadership emerging only recently.

In the most recent general elections in 2009, the Congress emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha, with 206 of its candidates getting elected to the 543-member house. Consequently it, as the leader of a coalition of political parties called the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), was able to gain a majority and form the government. (Source : Wikipedia)

President : Sonia Gandhi

Congress is currently in power in eight states (Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram)where the party enjoys a majority of its own.
In five other states — Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand — it shares power with other alliance partners.
In Tamil Nadu, it lost power in the 1967 assembly election and has not been able to recapture it since.
In the remaining states and in the union territory of Puducherry, various opposition parties are in power.